All there is
“None so blind as those who will not see”
At the end of last year, Britain’s Royal Statistical Society invited, for the first time, their members and the general public to nominate their favourite statistic. In the world of words, dictionaries like the OED and Merriam-Webster have had a word of the year tradition for over 10 years now. Germany’s national language society, the GfDS, has even been choosing a Wort des Jahres since 1971. It was obviously time for a numerical equivalent.
The UK statistic of the year referred to the percentage of UK land area that is ‘densely built upon’, also known as continuous urban fabric. If you’ve not heard of the statistic, even if you’ve not been to the UK, do take a guess (the answer is somewhere further in this article.)
Not so educated guesses
The statistic is striking (and presumably got voted to the top spot) because it is so different from what most people would guess it is. We could be excused for being ignorant about the tallest mountain on Mars, the length of the river Nile or the total daily production of crude oil, unless we have a special interest in these topics. But you might expect people living in the UK to be able to give a reasonable guess that is off by at most a factor 2 or 3.
